Han Chin Pet Soo, Ipoh

Han Chin Pet Soo was founded in 1893 as a club for Hakka tin miners and mine owners, and it moved into this shophouse in 1929. Restored and reopened as a museum, it is presented over three floors as a series of tableaux showing what the club actually was: a place where members gathered after work, and where gambling, opium and the other trades of a mining town were part of the arrangement. Cases and reconstructions cover the dredges and gravel pumps of the Kinta valley, the Hakka associations behind the labour, and the women who worked the tailings. Entry is by guided tour in small groups, booked ahead. It is one of the better told local museums in the country and explains why Ipoh looks the way it does.

What you actually see

• The mining gallery - models and photographs of dredges, gravel pumps and the Kinta pits.
• The club rooms - reconstructed gambling and opium rooms of the miners' association.
• The Hakka displays - the clan associations and migration that staffed the mines.
• The upper-floor tableaux - figures and objects showing the town's less respectable trades.

When to go

Tours run at fixed times on set days and fill up, so book well ahead; walk-ins are usually turned away. Morning slots are cooler in a building with little air conditioning. Combine it with a walk through the old town before the midday heat, and with breakfast at one of the kopitiams a street away.

Honest expectations

You cannot simply turn up, and the booking requirement defeats a lot of visitors. Tours are timed and move at the guide's pace, so lingering is limited. The building is small and hot, with steep stairs and no lift. Some of the mannequin tableaux are crude. Photography is restricted in parts of the house.

Nearby

Concubine Lane, the Ipoh railway station and the Kinta valley cave temples are all close.